Cultural Landscape

Emergence and Changing Definitions of a Keyword

Implicit in Jackson's definition is a tension that has long characterized discussions of landscape, a tension that has a great deal to do with its etymology. The English word landscape contains within it two specific meanings that are at once complementary and, at times, contradictory: the human shaping of territorial space (the earth's surface) and mental or visual images of that space (that which can be comprehended at a glance). These two meanings—the material and the representational—entered the English language through different routes and eventually merged into the multifaceted word that we know today.

During the Middle Ages in England, landskipe or landscaef referred to a specific portion of land occupied, managed, and controlled by an identifiable group of people—not natural scenery but rather land that had been modified by human interaction. This Old English sense of landscape as jurisdiction seems to have gradually disappeared from use when, by the 17th century, the related Dutch word landschap entered the English language. Here a landscape connoted the look or appearance of the land, especially in paintings of the rural scene. Landscape historian John Stilgoe described how, by 1630, landscape referred to both paintings and large-scale rural vistas that were pleasing to the eye—the hilltop views of villages, fields, woods, and church spires that so inspired England's emerging merchant class.

A third source came from continental Europe during the late 19th century, when universities in several countries—most notably France and Germany—developed influential scholarly traditions to examine the relationship between the natural environment and human intervention. In Germany, geographers began to define their new discipline as landscape science, whereby geography was most concerned with the form of landscapes in particular areas. These early German geographers strove to categorize with scientific precision the regions, settlements, village types, and agricultural systems throughout the country; thus, the word landschaft stood for a specific area defined by identifiable material features, both physical and cultural.

Morphology of Landscape

A young University of California, Berkeley, professor who had studied in Germany introduced the concept of landschaft into American geography. Carl Sauer began his long career as chair of the Department of Geography at Berkeley during the early 1920s and in 1925 published his landmark essay, “The Morphology of Landscape.” More than perhaps any single work by a geographer, [Page 76]Sauer's essay set the agenda for the discipline; it inspired a generation of scholars and set the stage for the innovative work conducted by him and his colleagues that came to be known as the Berkeley School of cultural geography.

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